Jill Jolliffe
Jill Jolliffe is a Darwin-based writer who has covered wars in Angola, East Timor, and the Western Sahara. Her latest book, Finding Santana, was published by Wakefield Press in 2010.
Shirley Shackleton is well known to those acquainted with the story of the fight for justice by the families of the Balibo Five, the five reporters who were slaughtered in 1975 in a border town of what was then Portuguese Timor. Her husband, Greg Shackleton, and his colleagues, Gary Cunningham, Tony Stewart, Brian Peters and Malcolm Rennie – all in their twenties – were killed by Indonesian so ... (read more)
Jill Jolliffe was one of only two reporters in Dili on 16 October 1975, the day the Australian-based newsmen, soon to be known as the Balibo Five, went missing after an Indonesian attack on the small East Timorese border town of Balibo. Jolliffe filed for AAP Reuters the first reports of the attack that killed them, and monitored the ominous broadcasts from Indonesian-controlled West Timor that re ... (read more)
This is a poignant and beautifully presented work about a community most Australians have lived alongside for decades without enquiring about the lives of its members. Reading it should jolt us out of our complacency.
Memory Is Another Country: Women of the Vietnamese Diaspora is the product of a project financed by the Australian Research Council and undertaken by Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen, her ... (read more)
The careful media management accompanying the Australian National Archive’s release in January 2004 of cabinet papers covering the first year in office of the Whitlam government underlined the interest of the ageing ex-prime minister and his supporters in safeguarding his status as an Australian icon. It was a success: most analysts agreed that the papers showed that in 1973 the newly elected La ... (read more)
Thirty-four years after the former colony of Portuguese Timor experienced the horrors of invasion by the Indonesian army, the story of the killing of the five television journalists known as the Balibo Five – a persistent subtext of that history – has found new life in the forthcoming feature film Balibo, directed by Arenafilm’s Robert Connolly. In reviewing Tony Maniaty’s related book, I ... (read more)
Think of Syria today and you have East Timor in 1975–78, the main difference being that the story of Indonesia’s brutal invasion was totally hidden from the world. It was in this framework of pain, trauma, and confusion that an estimated three to four thousand Timorese children were carried off to Indonesia without informed parental consent.
... (read more)
Witnesses to War, an ambitious book, is part of a larger project by the C.E.W. Bean Foundation to commemorate the work of Australian war correspondents. Fay Anderson and Richard Trembath, setting out to document the performance of Australian war correspondents, have tackled complex material. They deal with an enormous cast of characters and various interwoven themes, including the struggle against ... (read more)